Work Text:
Dahlia never knows when to expect it.
She knows it’s never a sure thing.
Maybe it is more for his benefit than hers. Not often does he do things for her benefit. It tends to be a collateral.
She has a sick thing in her. She has some sort of sickness that makes her like when he’s greedy, and when he’s selfish and mean.
She lands a job– slutty waitress is not a desirable position for maybe anyone else in the world as much as for her. You’d be surprised. She was wired that way. She was wired for eyes on her. She was wired for him.
The first day she spends an hour and a half in her and Daisy’s bedroom. Daisy is primping and preening her own hair, fixing the uniform that Dennis bought for her. It’s a size too small but Daisy isn’t going to admit it and Dennis won’t rest until she does, so they have this push-and-pull, just like Daisy is currently push-and-pulling the skirt so maybe she can walk from booth to booth without a hand landing on her ass.
“I really wish that you would do my makeup,” she tells her sister, and Daisy snorts.
“It’s not going to look any better if I do it,” Daisy responds matter-of-fact, “You got the wonky nose and the baby-fat cheeks. I think you should just live with it.”
“You’re mad,” Dahlia shoots back, so casual like she’s telling her sister, her only full flesh-and-blood sister, her horoscope from the crisp tenth page of a newspaper, “because I don’t get asked how far along I am when I’m trying to take orders.”
Daisy doesn’t say anything with her mouth but she does with her lungs when she sucks in a hard breath and her tummy disappears in the mirror like a magic trick.
Dahlia’s makeup table is half things she bought and half things that she stole from her older sister’s drawers. Dee doesn’t even need this stuff because Dee is pretty and she’s been pretty for a real long time, longer than she’s known what to do with it. Not like Dahlia. Well, she does her makeup with the sound of Daisy’s mumbling and humming along to her sticker-adorned radio in the background, filling up the airspace in their room until Dahlia feels like she’s breathing Britney Spears.
When Dennis sees her he puts an arm around her shoulders. His touch feels like electric sparks, a current through her every nerve. “It’s not the worst you’ve done your makeup,” he tells her off-handedly. It feels like the hand of God reaching out and cradling her face. Like heavenly thumbprints digging into her baby-fat cheeks.
–
The next time it’s just that they’re bored. She has on a pair of Mac’s old board shorts and a white tank top. Daisy is working on a Diet Coke, the straw between her gloss-shined lips and her eyes somewhere else. Her mind somewhere else. Not on the basketball game she’s supposed to be keeping score of.
Charlie is clearly winning so she can’t complain that there aren’t tallies being marked or anything. It’s not like he would know the difference.
The ball hits against the asphalt. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Her sneakers against the court. Scuffed heels. She bought these secondhand, high school, with the salary from her weekend job, a little gig that let her scrape up just enough so she could get this pair and then a nice set of black-ink markers so she could doodle absentmindedly on the soles. Or whatever it’s called, that white part that runs across the bottom like the rings of Saturn.
She hasn’t worn them in some time.
There’s a swish of the net when she throws the ball in the air and it smacks against the backboard. Frank had this idea some lifetime ago when she was growing up that maybe she could’ve been a sporty type of girl. Or maybe at least she’d grow up kind of strong and make him some good money beating out other girls while he bet against whatever kind of losers show up to little girls’ basketball games. It wasn’t strictly basketball. He tried to find something, anything that she was good at. Basketball didn’t last for long because she really didn’t have the legs and soon they’d learn she didn’t really have the height. He tried swimming, ballet, soccer, volleyball…
She retains, even now, a little bit, some this-and-thats, and when she aims with the ball in her two hands she has that practiced, ingrained bend of her knees and that white corner of the backboard’s square as her target.
“She shoots, she scores.” Dennis is leaning against his elbows near where Daisy’s sitting. Dahlia nearly trips over herself with the way her body shakes from the validation. From the knowledge that his eyes are on her. Daisy laughs and jots down a tally.
—
One of those times that she finally gets what she wants from him, it’s as nice as all of that had been.
It’s almost nicer.
Good girl, those are the words that reverberate through her. The words not hardly anyone had told her in her life, not in a way where she could delude herself into extracting meaning, sentiment, truth.
He is rough with his hands on her hips and his length throbbing inside of her. But he is almost kind with his words. Almost kind with his kisses. Can she believe it? Can she really be living this life, where her big brother crawls into her bed in the dead of night, lips tasting like white wine and yet whispering things she couldn’t ever fathom hearing from him? Things she can’t fathom hearing again– which is why tonight she embraces it. Embraces him.
“You’re pretty,” he says and it’s almost like it slips out, words escaping without permission, tumbling from the depths of him.
She doesn’t know what to say back. She doesn’t know if she can speak. If it’s in the script. If it’s allotted to her. If her airtime tonight in this love-addled slideshow includes a word or two in edgewise, and she almost hopes it doesn’t because she won’t be able to stop if she has the chance. Please don’t give it to me, she prays to whomever listens up there in the summer-night sky. Just let him call me pretty one more time.